Category: University/Local Issues

We’re all familiar with the usual discourse surrounding Oxbridge and state school admissions – Oxford needs to tackle its access problem urgently. Andrew Adonis, Labour peer and former Transport Secretary, has recently pitched a brand-new suggestion: opening new colleges aimed solely at applicants from state school backgrounds. In January, Adonis stated in The Guardian that […]

Image Description: four female students from Lady Margaret Hall. Last year, the Joanna Randall MacIver junior research fellowship, which was established in the 1930s exclusively for women specialising in the humanities, was opened up to all genders. This decision was made by the senior committee of the university – the Oxford Council – in response […]

At the protest against Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s Oxford Union talk last Tuesday, protestors shouted anti-police slogans at rather impassive lines of officers (and four very well groomed horses) while members of the campaign group Stand Up to Racism distributed placards with anti-Le Pen sentiments. These well-designed and always-plentiful placards can be seen hovering over the […]

Barely a day went by over the Christmas vacation when there wasn’t an Oxfess agonising over collections, asking whether they matter, what will happen if we fail, how we should prepare for them. Instead of Christmas being a time for rest and recuperation from a hectic Michaelmas, the vacation becomes a time for panic to […]

Image credit: Wikipedia (CC-BY-2.0) The Sutton Trust recently published a report which has since made waves on social media. The report finds that eight top British schools had as many Oxbridge acceptances as another 2894 schools and colleges put together between 2015 and 2017. This has brought to light the debate on where the fault and […]

Image Credit: Jiahui Huang (CC-BY-SA-2.0) For those of us without a home to go back to over the vac, Oxford can be a lonely place. The estrangement report, undertaken by the SU this summer, has offered many people an insight into what life is like for people like me. This report pointed out some really important […]

Image Credit: Facebook Oxford is losing a piece of its history. The story is being covered in local news, but our terms are so hectic that they rarely provide an opportunity for us to stop and look at the town that our university calls home. Elmer Cotton Sports has been a mainstay in Oxford’s sporting […]

Image credit: neiljs (Flickr) In the last two years, over 100 public libraries across the UK have been forced to close down. A further 500 are now being run by all-volunteer workforces, often made up of retirees working for nothing to keep their local communities alive. Even in the best-case scenario, volunteer-run libraries lack oversight […]

Image Credit: Wikipedia. Earlier this term, The Daily Mail published an article headlining ‘Bottom’s up! Oxford University students dance in the street as they party into the night for Freshers’ Week’. On first glance, this provided me with much amusement as I scrolled through the photographs looking to see if I anyone I knew had […]

Image credit: Facebook The 2012 Facebook event description of the St. Anthony’s annual HalloQueen bop read: “HalloQueen, the rules are simple: boys – dress like girls, girls – dress like boys.” It was the start of something of a tradition. Each year around Halloween, the St. Anthony’s bop attire encourages students to cross-dress. The title […]

Image credit: Facebook Weidel’s cancellation is a missed opportunity – Kit O’Loughlin Harold Macmillan once called the Oxford Union “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”. If you think that’s a compliment, as I do, you may find yourself in the minority. Recently, more than two-thirds of our representatives at the SU voted to […]

Image Credit: Flicker Guo-Sheng Liu was formerly co-chair of the SU LGBTQ+ Campaign, BME Representative of the LGBTQ+ Society, LGBTQ+ Representative at Lincoln College, committee member of the SU Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality and It Happens Here campaign. Racism operates beyond the individual. Racism is a system of beliefs, power, and privileges. Racism […]

Image credit: Pexels Whether you are a fresher or a battle-worn fourth-year, you may have heard whisperings of an event on the horizon. Yes, fifth week is well upon us, and it’s accompanied by a cloud of discontent – the legendary Fifth Week Blues. The legend goes that suddenly, the moment we enter the first week […]

Image Credit: Wikipedia. Until relatively recently, my knowledge of Nicaragua was largely limited to what I’d managed to glean from The Clash’s album Sandinista!. While both funky and punky, it is sadly lacking in the kind of in-depth analysis necessary to explain the complicated political situation in the central American country that, since independence in […]

Image Credit: PxHere Warning: this article contains explicit discussion of rape, abuse and gaslighting. I want to start by saying that Nice Guy is a great play. The characters are compelling, the score is fantastic, the acting is phenomenal. But as someone who has experienced abuse in the past, it disappointed me. Nice Guy, the new musical […]